Prisoner of the White House
With Covid-19 tearing through the country, a frustrated President Trump spends hours a day monitoring cable TV news and fuming about the coverage, said Katie Rogers and Annie Karni in The New York Times.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP arrives in the Oval Office these days as late as noon, when he is usually in a sour mood after his morning marathon of television.
He has been up in the White House master bedroom as early as 5 a.m. watching Fox News, then CNN, with a dollop of MSNBC thrown in for rage viewing. He makes calls with the TV on in the background, his routine since he first arrived at the White House.
But now there are differences.
The president sees few allies no matter which channel he clicks. He is angry even with Fox, an old security blanket, for not portraying him as he would like to be seen. And he makes time to watch Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s briefings from New York, closely monitoring for a sporadic compliment or snipe.
Confined to the White House, the president is isolated from the supporters, visitors, travel, and golf that once entertained him, according to more than a dozen administration officials and close advisers who spoke about Trump’s strange new life. He is tested weekly, as is Vice President Mike Pence, for Covid-19.
The economy—Trump’s main case for re-election—has imploded. News coverage of his handling of the coronavirus has been overwhelmingly negative as Democrats have condemned him for a lack of empathy, honesty, and competence in the face of a pandemic. Even Republicans have criticized Trump’s briefings as long-winded and his rough handling of critics as unproductive. His own internal polling shows him sliding in some swing states, a major reason he declared a temporary halt to the issuance of green cards to those outside the United States. The executive order—watered down with loopholes after an uproar from business groups—was aimed at pleasing his political base, people close to him said, and is the kind of move Trump makes when things feel out of control. Friends who spoke to him said he seemed unsettled and worried about losing the election.
But the president’s primary focus, advisers said, is assessing how his performance on the virus is measured in the news media, and the extent to which history will blame him. “He’s frustrated,” said Stephen
Moore, an outside economic adviser to
Trump whom the president planned to nominate to the Federal Reserve board before his history of sexist comments and lack of child support payments surfaced. “It’s like being hit with a meteor.”
Trump frequently vents about how he is portrayed. He was enraged by an article this month in which his health secretary, Alex Azar, was said to have warned Trump in January about the possibility of a pandemic. Trump was upset that he was being blamed while Azar was portrayed in a more favorable light, aides said. The president told friends that he assumed Azar was working the news media to try to save his own reputation at the expense of Trump’s.
Aides said the president’s low point was in mid-March, when Trump, who had dismissed the virus as “one person coming in from China” and no worse than the flu, saw deaths and infections from Covid-19 rising daily. Mike Lindell, a Trump donor, campaign surrogate, and the chief executive of MyPillow, visited the White House later that month and said the president seemed so glum that Lindell pulled out his phone to show him a text message from a Democratic-voting friend of his who thought Trump was doing a good job. Lindell said Trump perked up after hearing the praise. “I just wanted to give him a little confidence,” Lindell said.
THE DAILY WHITE House coronavirus task force briefing is the one portion of the day that Trump looks forward to, although even Republicans say that the two hours of political attacks, grievances, and falsehoods from the president are hurting him politically.
Trump will hear none of it. Aides say he views the briefings as prime-time shows that are the best substitute for the rallies he can no longer hold but craves.
Trump rarely attends the task force meetings that precede the briefings, and he typically does not prepare before he steps in front of the cameras. He is often seeing the final version of the day’s main talking points that aides have prepared for him for the first time, although aides said he makes tweaks with a Sharpie just before he reads them live. He hastily plows through them, usually in a monotone, in order to get to the question-and-answer bullying session with reporters that he relishes.
The briefings’ critics, including Cuomo, have pointed out the obvious: With two hours of the president’s day dedicated to hosting what is still referred to as a prime-time news briefing, who is going to actually fix
after Trump arrived unannounced in the Situation Room, wearing a polo shirt and baseball cap, and told the group he planned to attend the briefing and watch from a chair on the side. When aides told him that reporters would simply yell questions at him, even if he was not on the small stage, he agreed to take the podium. He has not looked back since.
When Trump finishes up, 90 or more minutes later, he heads back to the Oval Office to watch the end of the briefings on TV and compare notes with whoever is around from his inner circle.
HAT CIRCLE HAS shrunk significantly, as the president, who advisers say is more sensitive to criticism than at nearly any other point in his presidency, has come to rely on only a handful of longtime aides.
Hope Hicks, a former communications director who rejoined the White House this year as counselor to the president, maintains his daily schedule. His former personal assistant, Johnny McEntee, now runs presidential personnel.
Hicks and McEntee, along with Dan Scavino, the president’s social media guru who was promoted this week to deputy chief of staff for communications, provide Trump with a link to the better old days. The three are the ones outside advisers get in touch with to find out if it’s a good time to reach the president or pass on a message. Mark Meadows, Trump’s new chief of staff, is still finding his footing and adjusting to the nocturnal habits of Trump, who recently placed a call to Meadows, a senior administration official said, at 3:19 a.m. Meadows works closely with another trusted insider: Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and de facto chief of staff.
While many officials have been encouraged to work remotely and the Old Executive Office Building is empty, the West Wing’s tight quarters are still packed. Pence and his top aides, usually stationed across the street, are working exclusively from the White House, along with most of the senior aides, who dine from the takeout mess while the in-house dining room remains closed. Few aides wear masks except for Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, and some of his staff.
S SOON AS he gets to the Oval Office, the president often receives his daily intelligence briefing, and Pence sometimes joins him. Then there are meet
TAings with his national security team or economic advisers.
Throughout the day, Trump calls governors, will have lunch with Cabinet secretaries, and pores over newspapers, which he treats like official briefing books and reads primarily in paper clippings that aides bring to him. He calls aides about stories he sees, either to order them to get a world leader on the phone or to ask questions about something he has read. Many friends said they were less likely to call Trump’s cellphone, assuming he does not want to hear their advice. Those who do reach him said phone calls have grown more clipped: Conversations that used to last 20 minutes now wrap up in three. Trump will still take calls from Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, on the latest on polling data. The president will in turn call Meadows and another aide, Kellyanne Conway, about key congressional races.
The president’s aides have slowly lined up more opportunities to keep him engaged. Last week, a small group of coronavirus survivors were led into the White House, and Trump took one of them to see the White House physician. Then Trump hosted a celebration of America’s truckers on the South Lawn.
After he is done watching the end of the daily White House briefing—which is held seven days a week, sometimes as late as 8 p.m.—Trump eats his usual comfort foods, including french fries, in his private dining room off the Oval Office. He asks staff members who might still be around for an assessment of how the briefing went. Lately, aides say, his mood has started to brighten as his administration moves to open the economy. His new line, both in public and in private, is that there is reason to be optimistic.
“And at the end of that tunnel, we see light,” Trump said in the Rose Garden last week.
If he is not staying late in the West Wing, Trump occasionally has dinner with his wife, Melania Trump, and their son, Barron, who recently celebrated his 14th birthday at home.
By the end of the day, Trump has turned back to his constant companion, television. Upstairs in the White House private quarters—often in his own bedroom or in a nearby den—he flicks from channel to channel, reviewing his performance.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Used with permission.